Measuring and Modelling Language Interactions (MeMoLI)
Large-scale migrations result in different languages and cultures getting in contact with each other. It
happened so in the past, and continues happening so in the 21st century Europe. Jewish languages, such as
Yiddish, Ladino, Judeo-Arabic or Judeo-Italian, represent eminent examples of such linguistic and cultural
interactions, and they will serve as case studies in our project.
The present project is composed of two parts. Language interaction, as exemplified by Yiddish and other
Jewish languages, will be first measured using contemporary techniques in dialectometry. The Language and
Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ) will serve as the dataset for understanding how cultural and
linguistic features have spread in Jewish communities across Europe, and how these features interact with
the local non-Jewish cultures and languages.
Second, the quantitative picture thus arrived at will be reproduced using computer simulations. These
simulations will combine social network models with cognitive architectures. The social structure and
historical change will be approached by a multi-agent version of the Iterative Learning Model. Then, each
agent will be equipped with a linguistically motivated cognitive architecture representing the linguistic
knowledge in each agent's mind. In particular, the project focuses on Optimality Theory (OT) and its variants
(Harmonic Grammar, Maximum Entropy OT, Simulated Annealing for OT, etc.).
These contemporary linguistic frameworks come with elaborated learning algorithms, and are
implemented by the applicant's OTKit software package. Dialectometry, as well as computer simulations with
cognitive models and social networks represent state-of-the-art techniques hardly applied to the study of
Jewish languages. The applicant has acquired these techniques in the Netherlands and the United States, and
he will transfer them to Hungary.
|Project title:||Measuring and Modelling Language Interactions|
|Call:||Marie Curie Career Integration Grants (CIG), FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG|
|Duration of the project: ||July 2014–June 2018|
|Keywords:||Language variation; Jewish languages; Yiddish; dialectometry;|
Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry; social networks;
Iterative Learning Model; Optimality Theory; computer simulations.